


Stillwater

by RoseByAnyOtherName17



Series: The Lion, the Wolf and the Dragon [28]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Comfort, F/M, Love, Strategy & Tactics, War, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 05:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18403988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseByAnyOtherName17/pseuds/RoseByAnyOtherName17
Summary: No one expected her to speak, which was more than evident in the way everyone’s heads swiveled to her as soon as she did. “The dungeons beneath the castle,” she said quietly. “Where the dragon skulls are kept.”





	Stillwater

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all, I can't apologize enough for the length between updates and have no excuse other than life trying to kick my ass. But it's here, and I'm hoping the next few parts come along a little bit quicker now that life is getting ready to take a break for a little bit.
> 
> Thank you so much for following me through this journey, and I hope you enjoy this.

Arya was prepared to enter King’s Landing herself. She knew that it was the smartest thing to do: send her in alone, assassinate Cersei, and in the ensuing confusion, Daenerys could take the city and the Iron Throne. But she was not as foolish as Jaime Lannister considered her to be, she thought bitterly. Cersei was not alone in her castle. Daenerys may have Varys as her own lord of whispers now, but there were others. A pyromancer, certainly, or she would never have successfully blown up the Sept of Baelor without taking the rest of the city with it. The mysterious knight that never left her side, the one that Varys suspected was the Mountain, or some shell of him. Which meant that, since there were no Red Priests or Priestesses in King’s Landing, Cersei had a necromancer as well.

 

And there was no telling who else she might have accumulated since the death of her children.

 

Arya could not fight them all alone, even if she were to pose as a servant; they undoubtedly knew every face amongst themselves, Cersei and her dead knights and her magicians. Unless Arya were to kill and take the face of one of the ones who was already there…but she could not do that. She could not kill an innocent whose only crime was serving a madwoman.

 

It was the question that Arya had been pondering for months, ever since she decided to leave the Faceless Men and join Daenerys, before she knew that Jon had taken back Winterfell and her family was alive. Back when all she had on her mind was the revenge that the Faceless Men would not allow her to exact. Months, and still Arya had no answer. So much more than revenge rode on what happened now though. The lives of her family, of Gendry, of the queen she had sworn herself to serve, all depended on this next move.

 

She wasn’t the only one frustrated by the seemingly impossible task; after Ser Jaime left for the North with a small company of Unsullied and a note from Arya, as well as a raven sent to arrive ahead of them, Daenerys became more and more irritable as each day passed with no new information or plan. Tyrion spent every waking moment - at least those that weren’t taken up by strategizing for a strike on King’s Landing – designing a saddle for Rhaegal. Though his talent admittedly lay in working metal and not leather, Gendry did what he could to help, taking measurements of Rhaegal and assisting in putting the rudimentary pieces together of each new design. The green dragon was ever-patient through this process, leading to Gendry’s growing confidence around him until he had no problems asking Rhaegal to lift his head or wings, or twist his body a certain way. Rhaegal even allowed Gendry to climb on his back once while Tyrion stood in front of him so they could span the base of his neck with their hands. With both pairs of hands, their fingertips still did not quite touch on the sides of the dragon’s admittedly thick neck.

 

Even the soft, gentle Missandei was growing angry. She said nothing, but her body drew taut as a bow every time the subject of an invasion came up empty of solutions, and her sweet, dark eyes were flinty with barely-suppressed rage. Her jaw was clenched so hard so much that Arya was worried she would break her own teeth, but to point it out would be hypocritical; Arya woke every morning with her own jaw aching and had a near-constant headache because of it.

 

“There’s something we’re missing, there has to be,” she said for the umpteenth time on the eighth day after Jaime Lannister’s departure. She was braced over the map, hands on either side of the rough depiction of King’s Landing that, truthfully, wasn’t so far from Dragonstone. She was staring down at the city with narrowed eyes, feeling personally mocked by its impenetrable walls and her own inability to find her way past them without civilian bloodshed.

 

Gendry’s hand rested between her shoulder blades, not with pressure, just there. In the past days, he had become the only one who could touch her without some sort of retort. Even his hands were beginning to feel more burdensome than comforting now though.

 

To everyone’s surprise, Myrcella had trailed into the room behind Tyrion that morning, giving Daenerys a quiet, polite greeting and then sitting in the corner and listening to them in silence. She gave no indication that she was paying very close attention other than her sharp gaze on the map, her uncle and, most often, Arya herself. Arya wasn’t comfortable trying to plan the assassination of the girl’s _mother_ in front of her, but Myrcella knew what was happening, and she chose to be here.

 

However, no one expected her to speak, which was more than evident in the way _everyone’s_ heads swiveled to her as soon as she did. “The dungeons beneath the castle,” she said quietly. “Where the dragon skulls are kept.”

 

And suddenly, a dim memory surfaced in Arya’s head, long since discarded. “One of them leads to a little cove,” she remembered. “I found it when I got lost in the tunnels.” She frowned. “How do _you_ know about that?”

 

“Your father told my – told King Robert. About how you got lost chasing cats and came out on the other side of the castle. You told him about the dragon skulls.” She shook her head, smiling bitterly. “Tommen made me take him to see them because Joffrey wouldn’t. We ended up coming out the same way you must have. We had to go all the way around to castle gates to get back in.”

 

Arya stared unseeingly at the map for a long moment. “Cersei _has_ to know about that cove,” she said, “or someone who serves her does.”

 

Myrcella shook her head. “Maybe she knows about it, but not that it leads inside the castle. It took Tommen and I _hours_ to come out where we did. And not all of it is lit.”

 

“Surely you told her where you ended up?” Arya challenged. Myrcella may not be Jaime Lannister, but she certainly was not _giving_ them a way into King’s Landing to kill her mother. “I was filthy when I found my way outside.”

 

Myrcella shrugged. “She didn’t really ask, except to scold me for ruining my dress. Tommen and I just told her that we’d been playing in the godswood. Mother never really cared what we did, not until the war started. She only kept a real eye on us then.” Arya could see her expression of disbelief reflected in the other woman’s eyes, and knew that everyone in the room could see it too. Myrcella stood up and crossed to stand at the table, mirroring Arya’s stance with both hands planted on the map. “I understand that you think this may be a trick,” she said levelly, “but remember that I haven’t returned to King’s Landing since I was betrothed to Trystane. I have no idea what my mother might have done with her guards in my absence, other than what I have heard from my father and from you.”

 

“You understand what will happen when we take King’s Landing?” Arya said bluntly, refusing to break eye contact. “Cersei Lannister will die like my father died. But, in her case, her crimes are real. She _has_ committed them.”

 

Myrcella stared at her for a long time, long enough for Tyrion to start moving toward her and for Gendry to lay his hand on the back of Arya’s neck, a gentle reminder to straighten up so that her neck wouldn’t ache later. She did so, but just as Tyrion reached for his niece’s hand, Myrcella spoke again. “She killed Tommen,” she murmured, just loud enough for all the room to hear. “She may not have pushed him out of that window, but she murdered his wife and the family he had grown to love. I don’t want my mother to die, but I am not fool enough to believe that, if I were to return to her, if I were the one in her way of the Iron Throne, she would spare me too.” She huffed out a laugh mirthlessly. “Besides, if you don’t, the White Walkers will, won’t they? If it is as you say, they’ll find their way south eventually. None of us will be left alive then.”

 

Arya didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know Myrcella, not well, and what she did know of the girl was not this person in front of her. “You can’t take this back, you know,” she told her quietly. “You can’t take back the dungeon and the cove.”

 

Myrcella raised her head high. “Do with it what you will,” she answered. “As for me…I just wanted to marry Trystane.”

 

The silence left in the wake of her words lasted for a long, long time.

 

**

 

Myrcella’s knowledge of the tunnels beneath the Red Keep were the missing piece they had needed all along. Even so, the plan they were building was shaky and relied a lot on Cersei’s own madness and arrogance to work.

 

“She knows by now that you are pledged to Her Grace,” Tyrion said to Arya when she offered to lead the men into the castle. “Cersei will know that something is wrong if you are not at her side, as much as she will if _I_ am not there.”

 

Arya accepted it, as hard as it was. “So who will head the charge?”

 

“I will.”

 

Her immediate reaction was to say _no_. But Gendry was standing steadily next to her, and his next words made all of the sense in the world. “We need to draw her out, and with her, we need her army. In order to do that, we ourselves must show up in full force; she will expect nothing less. But she won’t leave her castle just to speak to Daenerys Targaryen – she needs a reason. And that’s you.”

 

Arya already knew what he was saying, but Daenerys asked, “Why?”

 

“Because Arya is the sister of the King in the North, and she more than anyone else here knows of the Night King and his army,” Gendry explained. He met her gaze and continued, “You heard the stories growing up, even if that’s all they were at the time. If anyone could convince Cersei to listen, even if she doesn’t believe it, it’s you. You need to tell her of the White Walkers and convince her that _they_ are the real threat, not the dragon queen. She won’t believe you, but it’ll buy us enough time to take the castle and open the gates.”

 

“Suppose she won’t meet us outside the castle,” Daenerys said. “What then?”

 

“Then the same will happen,” Tyrion realized, “but we will be trapped inside with our army outside of the gates. We’ll have to rely on Gendry and the fifty or so men we can afford to spare without notice to open the gates, and do our best not to die in the process.”

 

“What is to stop her from burning the city the moment we appear at its gates?”

 

For the second time, Myrcella shocked them all. “Me,” she said.

 

**

 

Arya made Gendry squeeze into the bunk next to her that night, the fire from the forge throwing a soft glow across his face. The shadow of his eyelashes fluttered as he blinked slowly, sweeping his thumb across her cheek underneath her eye, over and over until she finally let her body go loose.

 

“Promise me something,” she whispered.

 

Gendry pressed his lips to her forehead and waited.

 

“If I die in this war, or the next, you will not follow me.”

 

He said nothing, but then, she didn’t expect him to. Instead, he wrapped both arms around her and pulled her into his chest where she could tuck her face into his neck and block out the light of the dying embers behind her.


End file.
